Land battles: Hardy-Gallagher Park

 

Just south of the Brunswick border is a small tract of bushland, a bocce court, a railway station with no train line, a children’s playground. This enchanted pocket of parkland is the meeting place of a number of intertwining stories. It used to be part of the Inner Circle line. The station building is now a Neighbourhood House. The bocce court is a memorial to an adventurous Italian immigrant, but the park itself owes its existence to a struggle and confrontation between the community and short sighted interests.

The Lamentations of Bobby Gatto

 

I have had the most dreadful time! Not since the abuse I suffered in my kittenhood, at the hands of the cruel woman who put me in a cage and took me away from my trusty old manservant, who called me Bert but later got into the habit of dressing me in a handkerchief and serving me buttered bread and jam….. but I digress.

My first uncovering

Here is a photograph that I took in June 2013, at the time of the Eleanor or Hildegard post. Two Art Deco apartment blocks side by side on Lygon Street. Whilst the one of the right hand side is perfect in its symmetry, the one on the left has obviously been designed to fit into a narrow space.
A few days ago I noticed an empty space where that building used to stand.

Mediterranean influence

One of the first places Vince took me when he first showed me around Brunswick was “the Mediterranean” - the supermarket, where every wine label is a line from Petrarch, every packet of pasta is an adventure and the cheese cabinet is a geography lesson!

Within spitting distance of Franco Cozzo there are many other reminders of the settlers from Italy, Greece and the Middle Sea. Here are but a few snaps from that small pocket of Sydney Road.

Albion Street

East Brunswick Auto

 

Brunswick is laid out on a grid, with the big streets such as Melville Road, Sydney Road, Lygon Street and Holmes/Nicholson Streets running north south. Apart from Brunswick Road (the southern boundary) and Moreland Road (the northern boundary) the streets running east west are small and narrow. However some of these are main routes in disguise. Albion Street has a bus service that takes you all the way to Essendon, so it is really quite an artery. It starts at the top of Lygon Street Brunswick East, with this wonderful old ghost garage just opposite the imposing façade of the Lyndhurst Club Hotel.

Yesterday I was out around Albion Street. It was a beautiful late spring day and I found a few more ghost signs.

Gallery Saint Phalle and Lake Mungo

Paul Mason: Lake Mungo, in Gallery Saint Phalle

In the back room of the Red Wheelbarrow on Lygon Street, Catherine has set up a beautiful little gallery. It is called Gallery Saint Phalle. They moved the bookshelves out and into Paul's shop, making the front room a kind of booklovers’ maze. You can stand there and not know who is on the other side. On a winter’s day like today, the lamp from his desk and the heater cast a dim warm light.


The back room however is the complete opposite: lightness.

On the shortest day of the year, Catherine opened “Solstice”, an exhibition of drawings by Paul Mason. They are perfect for the Gallery: gray lead drawings on white paper that defy dimension and create space through lines. One of them documents an epiphany that the artist had in a particular place. And as I had a couple of weeks’ break coming up, it gave me a destination: Lake Mungo.

Ghost neon signs and skeleton signs

 

 

As I walked along Sydney road I looked up and saw this wonderful old sign, not the supermarket one, but the one that says All Night Café. Straight out of some Hollywood movie. The metal structure is also magnificent. I have vague memories of driving back from Sydney in the days when the trip down Sydney Road was basically the only way to get into Melbourne, and no doubt the sign was then visible from afar. Not sure if it still lights up at night, must check that out next time I go to the Brunswick Green of an evening.